Mother Tongue (Hardback)

Fascinating, intriguing, witty, a gem of a book - Kate Mosse

Full of interesting observations ... Entertaining - Philip Hensher, Spectator

Wonderful - Hannah Betts, Daily Telegraph

Jenni Nuttall's Mother Tongue will easily be one of the wittiest and most insightful books of the year - Buzz Magazine

A fresh, informative perspective on women's lives through the centuries - Kirkus

A great book on the history of women's words in the English language - Adam Sharp, New European

An eye-opening survey of the etymology of words used to identify women's body parts, the kind of work they performed, and the violence they suffered from men in Anglo-Saxon English from the 400s to the 1800s (with brief forays into more recent times). . . . This is required reading for logophiles, feminists, and history buffs - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the womb-wicket to the child-mighty, and roaring maidens to cunning crones, MOTHER TONGUE encompasses a millennium of enthralling English parlance. Incisively scholarly, affectionately humorous (and sometimes quietly furious), Nuttall sifts the archives of centuries and listens to modern echoes, as lost voices emerge, showing how women have long spoken, and been spoken of. Vivid, philosophical, absorbing and urgent, this superb book teems with historical marvels and their 21st century resonances - Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of KINDRED

What a revelatory delight of a book. It is richly scholarly, wry and funny, healthily grounded in women's bodily experiences - they don't change but attitudes towards them do, and we are clearly very mistaken if we think we are getting it right and previous generations were unenlightened. There is a nugget of joy and wisdom on every single page - Victoria Whitworth